There’s a photo making the rounds across Latin American social media: Abelardo De La Espriella, nicknamed «El Tigre» (The Tiger), greeting a delirious crowd in Barranquilla, Colombia, as it celebrates his electoral victory. But behind that image lies a geopolitical postcard, a signal that travels from Bogotá to Washington, Beijing and Brussels.

With 49.65% of the vote against 48.70% for the leftist senator Iván Cepeda, the nationalist right-wing candidate won Sunday’s runoff (June 21, 2026) in one of the most hard-fought races in Colombia’s democratic history. Fewer than 250,000 votes separated them — the narrowest margin in decades — out of nearly 26 million ballots cast. Despite Cepeda’s challenge to the result (he has announced appeals over 33,000 polling stations), De La Espriella’s 12.9 million votes make him the most-voted presidential candidate in Colombian history.

From wealthy lawyer to Colombian president

Until a year ago, no one thought Abelardo De La Espriella would become Colombia’s next president. A successful criminal defense attorney — his clients included the founder of a Ponzi scheme that had defrauded thousands of Colombians, as well as the controversial businessman Alex Saab, who has close ties to Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro — he built his reputation in courtrooms, not in the halls of politics. He had never held public office or belonged to the major parties; what he did have was strong media visibility and a sharp instinct for social networks.

His campaign rested on «three» ideas: security, security, security. Mega-prisons, a military offensive against narco-terrorist guerrillas, bombs dropped on armed groups’ camps. «On day one I bomb all their camps,» he said on television without blinking. The stylistic reference is obvious — Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, the self-described «world’s coolest dictator» — even though De La Espriella denies wanting to imitate him. On top of all this, in the final weeks of the campaign, came Donald Trump’s explicit endorsement, a seal that, in today’s Latin America, is worth as much as an entire party’s.

Latin America’s turn to the right

De La Espriella’s win is not an isolated event. It is the latest chapter in a continent-wide political transformation that, in just a few years, has overturned what had looked like settled scenarios. What in the early 2020s had been dubbed the «pink tide» — the leftist governments of Petro in Colombia, Boric in Chile, Lula in Brazil, Castillo in Peru — has receded, amid struggling economies and an insecurity that has become an existential emergency.

The tally is long: Argentina with Javier Milei, Chile with José Antonio Kast, Ecuador with Daniel Noboa, Bolivia with Rodrigo Paz, Honduras with Nasry Asfura, Costa Rica with Laura Fernández. And now Colombia. In Peru, meanwhile, ballots from the June 7 runoff are still being counted, and the conservative Keiko Fujimori — on her fourth attempt — could win by just over 0.2%.

«It’s an unusual alignment of the stars for Trump,» Steven Levitsky, a professor of Latin American studies at Harvard, told Reuters. «You rarely see such a large number of ideologically convergent governments as the one we’re seeing now.»

The professor is right. But the convergence is not merely the product of chance or of voters’ fatigue with leftist governments that failed to keep their promises. There is a directing hand — or at least a push — that seems to come from Washington.

Trump’s Shield of the Americas

In March 2026, Trump convened more than a dozen Latin American leaders at his Doral resort in Florida to launch the «Shield of the Americas,» an anti-cartel security alliance that is, in reality, much more. It is an attempt to reassert the Monroe Doctrine in the 21st century with one «small» addition: keeping China out. Because the real stakes are not just drug trafficking. Latin America sits on a treasure the whole world wants — lithium, copper, niobium and rare earths, indispensable for modern technology and the arms race. China controls 70% of the extraction and 90% of the refining of these materials, but Washington wants to flip that equation, and a continent governed by MAGA-friendly leaders is the handiest tool for doing so.

De La Espriella has already said he is ready to join the Shield. He will also announce the reopening of oil exploration and fracking, halted by his predecessor Petro, at a moment when the war against Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have sent global energy prices soaring. Colombia borders Venezuela — which Trump «liberated» by having Maduro seized in a January operation — and its immense oil reserves. The Trumpian strategic picture fits together perfectly.

New governments, same problems

But beneath the surface of the victory, the problems remain. De La Espriella will have to govern with a hostile Congress, in which Cepeda and Petro’s Pacto Histórico holds more seats than any other party. Colombia is a country of 52 million people, with armed groups that control entire territories, illegal mines and drug-trafficking routes that elections do not dismantle. «Importing El Salvador’s security solutions into Colombia is not feasible — not legally, not budget-wise, not in terms of international commitments,» explained Sergio Guzmán, founder of Colombia Risk Analysis.

The risk is well known to anyone who has followed the region’s other right-wing governments. In Ecuador, violent crime rose 30% last year, even though Noboa had promised an iron fist. In Costa Rica, crime figures remain high. In Chile, Kast saw his approval rating collapse after the war against Iran forced the government to raise fuel prices. In Bolivia, which has just swung right under Rodrigo Paz, it took 50 days of roadblocks and a state of emergency to clear protests against austerity. And in Argentina, Milei’s measures continue to trigger street marches with almost weekly regularity.

One last tile remains, the most important: Brazil. With presidential elections set for October 2026, Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro — son of the former president, who is currently in prison — are neck and neck in the polls, both around 46%. Trump has bet openly on the younger Bolsonaro, and if Brazil too were to swing right, the continent’s transformation would be all but complete.

For now, though, Colombia is enough.

Editor’s note

This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Flavia Provenzani on June 22, 2026 as «L’America Latina sceglie (ancora) la destra. Ma dietro la vittoria di De La Espriella in Colombia c’è molto più». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.